Starts out? Perhaps, but I usually employ them in discussion and argument.

Your attempt to turn the virtue of buttressing one's argument with references to well respected scholarly authority into a vice is amusing.

I it must grow out of your demonstrated lack of New Testament knowledge. Since you can't match any of your opponents' knowledge, you seek to diminish the importance or value actually being informed on a particular issue.

Darn. I let you taunt me into responding to you.

"OK Layman - here are a few quotes, showing that Doherty addresses your concerns. Care to comment? You can follow the links."

He doesn't address Paul's use of Jewish eschatologoical language and the implications thereof. I expounded on the significance of this above. Do you concede the point?

Oooops! I forgot! It has to be an exact match or it doesn't count.

You're completely right, Layman, I do have too much time on my hands.

Michael

So did the original posters who also employed such references in their arguments (above).

That being the case, why did you feel justified in complaining that they were making unwarranted appeals to authority by citing their sources?

In other words, if you can do it, then why can't they also?

Oh, that's right - you're a christian; that implies an expert level of hypocrisy.



1. Claiming it is "well-respected" is a circular leap here, deLayman; and

2. my point was not that making such citations or references is wrong - my point was that you engage in it yourself, but then object, whine and moan when others do the same thing. In short, you're a hypocrite.

Well. . . . no, not worth it.

Gee Mike, you deleted the entire substance of my post.

Thanks.

The "match" was much further away than "exact."

Meta =>Because that's not what happened. It's clearly the case that none of the four evangelists made up their material. There is no reason to assume that, and prositive proof that it isn't true. See my answer to Lowder if it's still up. The Koester stuff proving that there was a preMarkan Passion narrative which included the empty tomb, probably daying to the middel of the century. And don't forget the other traditions he finds in the epiphenal sittings. All of these are proof of antecendent sources.


Meta =>Do you agree with the premise that shcolars are experts, and expret opinion is more valuable than non-expert opinion? Can you show me a shcoalr who supports that View? It is more like the consensus in the field that Matt is not "fixing" problems in mark but expanding upon the material by adding sources such as Q for his own hermeneutical purposes. That is not necesarily indicative of seeing Mistakes in Mark. Luke, on the otherhand is trying to be through, and Mark is just one source among many that he's using.

John is a lot more complex than any of the others but he's not just one guy--none of them are--who is trying to expand upon these three others, nor is he merely trying to depart from them. Rather he's combining the complex oral tradition of a huge development within a different trajectory of the chruch--that of his own community.John is actually three people, maybe more, but three major redactions which meld together three seperate stages of development form the Johonnine community. So He's not concenred with "fixing" the synopics, or with oppossing them, he's concerned with his own school.


Meta =>I think what's more reasonable is the idea that the eye witnesses went into different communities, and each of the Gospels reflects the testimony of those groups of witnesses. That's why MM is so important for John and not for the synoptics, for example. That's why John's world is so different than the others, he shows Jesus social circle, aspects of support in the Sanhedrin the others dont' admit to, such as Nichedemis and the differing view of doctrine is indicative of a somewhat closed group that developed indpendently of the others.


I suppose a die-hard mythicist could still claim that someone besides Mark made up the miracle stories. Perhaps the various 'miracle-workers' of that time period inspired a variety of stories that were later collected and attributed to Jesus.

Regardless of the exact scenario, Doherty's claim is mainly that the events of the gospels did not in fact happen, and that Paul's Jesus was not based on a human person.

I'll check out the Spong info later. Thanks, Michael for your suggestions and links


Meta =>but Dhortey's evidence isn't any better than any of the other Christ mythers. It's all argument from slience and bad scholarship.

Originally posted by Layman:
Gee Mike, you deleted the entire substance of my post.

Should I post one long post twice?

Thanks.

The "match" was much further away than "exact."

No, Layman, it is a quite specific match. You see, Hong preached all sorts of Christian doctrines. He borrowed his terminology and eschatology from Christianity, and both he and his followers misunderstood it. For example, Hong preached about the Holy Ghost. Hong's followers, however, instead of understanding the Holy Ghost to be a spirit not on earth, identified him with a specific person (one of the Taiping leaders), who took that as a title. Clearly that would be a case of misunderstanding a mythical/spiritual being as an actually existing being, from a missionary who learned his religion from another culture, and used the terminology of that culture. In fact, if you look on p. 230-231 there is a very funny list of questions from the Taiping higher-ups to the crew of a British vessel that happened to visit Nanjing, their capital. The Taipings wanted to know some of the exact traits of god, and expected the British to know, since they had been worshipping him for some time. Some of the questions are:

1. How tall is God, or how broad?
2. What is his appearance or colour?
….
8. What kind of clothes does he wear?
9. Was his first wife the Celestial Mother, the same that brought forth the Celestial Elder Brother Jesus?
…
13. How rapidly can he compose verse?

You can see that the Taipings understood god in a somewhat different way than the American missionary whose tracts inspired Hong. In fact, they had made a concrete person of a mythical (and I do not mean nonexistent) spirit being.

I'm sure, however, that Layman will not accept it as a good parallel, since Hong's name is spelled H-O-N-G and not P-A-U-L.

Michael

Meta =>I think that Skeptics get the wrong idea about what most Bible schoars are saying when they speak of things like redaction. They are not saying that the story is "false." They may think some particular thing is an embellishment, but they are not dismissing the core story out of hand.

Meta =>NO, Paul is very Jewish. You can't compare his theology to the OT. Rabbinical thought had developed a lot since the materials that were collected and redacted into the OT. That is all pre-second temple, or at leasat most of it, give or take Daniel and maybe some of the latter prophets. So you would do better to compare to the Mishna.


Meta =>No, some parts of the OT are very Platonic. Ever notice how the tabernacle was to be laid out according to a perfect tabernacle in heaven, like a Paltonic form? The culutre of Asia minor gave Paul a lot of influences, but he was primarily trained by Gamalliel and was very jewish. Modern Rabbis have commented on the Jewishness of Paul. I can't think of one off hand to document, but I have seen that mentioned.

Meta =>What Greek beliefs do you see?


Meta =>Paul demonstrates excellent knowledge of the law, but the conflicts he has with the Jerusalem chruch are over the law not over his understading of the facts of Jesus' life, or his doctrine of who Jesus was.No statment in the NT anywhere gives us the notion that they didn't approve of Paul's understanding of Jesus, or of his basic doctrines.


I think it would be fair to suggest that all of the Jewish people were well aware of Greek beliefs and customs.

Meta =>That's a rash conclusion.


Meta =>Yes, the Jews believed in one God, period. They believed that that God was not to be imaged or referenced thorugh protral or dipiction in any way. They thought the pagans were an abomination and when they called the Romans things like "Kittim" at Qumran it was great insult. I think it means something like "garabage." They would have thought it the ultiamte blaspheme to think of any other Gods.

Saying that Jesus was "Son of God" was a euphemism for refurring to the Messiah. That comes from the Book of Daniel where Daniel saw a vison of "one, like unto a son of Man" and form other sources where the Messiah is called "son of God." The books of Enoch, for example. So when they say that of Jesus they are connecting him to the God of the OT, it is a very Jewish thing to say.

Meta =>Yes, it was schocking and heretical in many ways, but saying that Jesus was God come in the flesh was not one of them. That was not all that schocking because the conception they had of the Messiah was that of a quasi divine being "like unto a son of man." They didn't have the concept of the Trinity, but they did have the idea of emmenations in which God emminated into the different Sepheroth (realms) through his presence or "Memra" a word which was interchangeable with the Greek term Logos. John's prolouge is very Jewish, it is not Greek. It is not the Greek concept of the Logos of Heraclitus that he is using but the connection of the term Memra to Logos. I can documentat that if need be.

So I'm not saying that the concept of God come in the flesh would not be schocking to them, nor would it be palatable for a man to claim to be God come in the flesh, but it would be more in keeping with Jewish theology than to calim that he was merely some etherial being, or another god, that one could worhsip apart form the true God.

Meta => Hellenistic does not mean that they worshiped or accepted other God's. It means that Greek was their primiary language; that's bascially what it means. There were "God fearers" among Roamans in Palestine, those who had "gone native." But they were shedding their pagan gods percisely because they had gone native.

Quote:

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2"> And Doherty has not dealt with your question, if I understand it. His argument is structured very differently. His argument starts with the idea that the early Christians held a Platonic view of reality, in which there was a higher spiritual plane of reality. He argues that Paul's references to Jesus referred to Jesus's existence on that higher plane. Do you have any response to that, or do you concede the point?

Meta => There is no evidence for that. and if I recll correctly,he thinks that because he doens't understand the connection of the word Logos to the Hebrew word Memra, and because he doesn't know about intertestemental heterodox Judasim which describes perfectly the basic doctrines of the early chruch regarding Jesus. There may have been an admixture in Greace, but that is not evidence that Paul was infected by it. It is evidence that he had to deal with it and that in dealing with it he had to use some of their langauge.

He might have changed, But when read his websitehe was assuming things about the Gospels that are absurd. For example, really late dates, that Jesus had no concrete history in the mind of the chruch until the second century and that starts with Tertullian. These things are absurd and have no basis in fact, in fact they can be dispelled by merely reading 1 Clement.